Safari to join "Do Not Track" crowd, leaving Google behind | Hacker News Reader

Safari to join "Do Not Track" crowd, leaving Google behind

arstechnica.com

91 pointsshawndumas44 comments

Oh, the irony!

Ghostery reports 3 tracker javascript frameworks in the link refered by this post: Lotame, Comscore Beacon and (guess what?) Google Analytics.

For those interested in privacy I'd recommend: http://www.ghostery.com/. It has protection for a lot of trackers in most web-browsers.

Help me out, I'm not seeing the irony.

The ars post contains the tracking code.

In addition, Ars also once tested out blocking content for those who ran ad-block.

Frankly, I think this is less irony and more solid reporting despite the conflict of interest. (Or rather, conflict of cash-flow.)

What does ghostery get me beyond what I get from the anti-tracking lists in Ad Block Plus?

I use both in Firefox. Ghostery sometimes blocks trackers that ABP doesn't. E.g: I didn't find google-analyitics in ABP's EasyList.

Rephrase: what does Ghostery get me that ABP + NoScript (which does get Google Analytics) doesn't?

(Serious question, just trying to keep my FF4 install somewhat lean.)

Not a lot. I think Ghostery is best for ABP without NoScript. People that don't like to manually allow everything, but want to block tracking javascript easily by default.

Aside from that, it may add value in telling you which of those javascripts are for tracking. This is usually obvious, but not always.

tl;dr: If you want a lean install, it probably is not necessary to add Ghostery to ABP+NS.

Thanks, I'm trying Ghostery out.

Are you affiliated with that link you posted in any way? Just curious.

:-D

No, I am just a plain and simple paranoid.

"Irony" is not what you think it is.

> "Irony" is not what you think it is.

Well, maybe. In English it seems that "irony" conveys only a rhetorical effect.

In Latin derived languages (Spanish, Portuguese), however, it also conveys a situation that turns out to be not what it seems at first sight; as in the Greek root eirōneía (dissimulation). We call it ironia del destino (destiny's irony). E.g.: one would expect a site that publishes news concerned about privacy not to collect information about visitors without them knowing it.

But I concede that English restricts the meaning of this word. Thanks for the correction.

You used the word properly. In addition, your response smacks of philosophical irony.

Further, I think it's ironic that even people who champion the proper use of ironic, don't know what it genuinely signifies.

I'd love to say it's also unfortunate that people put much thought into correcting others' use of the term, but that in and of itself would be an ironic statement.

How about Ghostery themselves providing services to the advertisement industry? [0]

[0] http://www.ghostery.com/faq (Last paragraph)

Interesting. So Ghostery users appear to opt-in to being tracked, then Ghostery shares that information with others.

http://news.ghostery.com/2011/03/04/ghostery-helps-the-bbb-t...

Until 51% of population uses it incorrectly. Then, because English reflects usage, they become correct.

Ironically, it is what he thinks it is.

DNT seems like a pretty crappy solution.

I think a lot of people will enable DNT not realizing they'll get exactly the same number of ads, just less relevant. And the web marketing companies who are doing evil things will just ignore the header.

DNT is not about blocking ads. It's about signaling that you don't want to be profiled for advertising purposes. If you don't mind being profiled for targeted ads, then don't flip the switch.

I know, that's what I said.

But if you really don't want to be tracked, can you trust marketers to respect this header? If not, what's the point?

You can trust them to respect it about as much as you can trust them to respect the opposing proposition, which is their "opt out cookie." The point is that it puts the onus on them.

The EFF explains this much better: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2011/02/what-does-track-do-not...

This isn't to make anyone untrackable. This is to make a far more consumer-friendly opt-out mechanism among those that are participating voluntarily.

If it becomes legislation, which is what is being debated, then it is somewhat like a DMCA for users. If an advertising company tries to circumvent it, they are acting illegally. This isn't a silver bullet for privacy, but it is really powerful.

The point is that some marketers are still honest and some also realize that it's smart to not piss off people, but there's no easy to use flagging mechanism that would signal your disapproval without user-experience suffering badly.

Also, some marketers might be honest, but that data may end-up in the wrong hands eventually. So if you care about privacy, any period of time in which you aren't tracked is a net win for your privacy.

Not to mention that this flag may end up being a useful argument in case of a lawsuit.

The point is that some marketers are still honest

So DNT is a mechanism for blocking the honest marketers that we trust to respect our communicated wishes, while still permitting the dishonest marketers to do what they will? As far as I can tell, DNT requires enforcement legislation to be effective.

some also realize that it's smart to not piss off people

How would someone tell that an advertiser is not respecting DNT and therefore be pissed off? Looking for suspicious cookies from third-party sites? The ads seem too personalized?

http://www.networkadvertising.org/managing/opt_out.asp doesn't require any special browser support

I think you are greatly understimate how great less relevant ads are.

Much less data/less identifying data gathered -> slightly less relevant ads and a huge win fore everyone. Not that this will lead to that but it would be great if it did.

I need this. I never really cared about ads and them showing up on websites, I dont mind if that is the way that the site makes its money. However, about two months ago I got a flyer in the mail for a local dentist, so I went to their website. Now every site that I go to has that dentist as the ad and I cannot figure out how to clear cookies/cache whatever to change it (it only happens on my laptop in a certain browser). Anyway, I welcome "do not track" and will definitely use it.

It's common now for ad networks to use "Flash cookies" -- meaning if you clear your cookies, they will just recreate them next time you hit their server using a cookie stored by Flash.

Remove them here: http://www.macromedia.com/support/documentation/en/flashplay...

Be sure to delete both Flash and normal cookies at the same time, since if one is present and the other is not, they will recreate each other. Better yet, use FlashBlock.

That's a start, but there are many other potential vectors for cookie data. See: http://samy.pl/evercookie/

Thank you, ill try that out

What I'd like is an implementation which simply allows each browser window/tab to be absolutely segregated from each other one + a "clear all cookies" button/menu-option.

What's so hard about that?

Same here. This whole single-session obsession needs to be broken, there are loads of uses for multiple sessions side-by-side. Mostly for developers / power-users, but they're the only ones who understand what running multiple sessions would mean in the first place. Running one page normally and the other in private-mode isn't a real solution, and doesn't scale - all private windows use the same session in all browsers I'm aware of.

The only exception I've found from my admittedly-fairly-minimal searching a while back is Stainless for OSX: http://www.stainlessapp.com/

What browser these days doesn't have a "clear all cookies" option? You can even browse in private mode and have your cookies cleared automatically. Chrome is working on multiple profile support: http://www.chromium.org/user-experience/multi-profiles

That's good to know (you can manage currently by changing where one version stores its data - I run stable, beta, and dev simultaneously this way). But it looks like that's not per-window / per-tab, but instead an application-wide setting. Or, the screenshots imply that to me (OSX especially). And multiple profiles, even at the same time, isn't the same as multiple sessions.

Some of the webserver log analysis tools I use, Analog and Visitors among them, show huge, huge discrepancies in numbers culled from the actual logs vs. what Google Analytics shows me. By that token I have concluded that people are already pretty successful at evading GA tracking to a large degree, though probably not to supercookie levels.

If you mean the raw server requests, a lot of that will come from bots/etc without a javascript engine. Blocking GA is probably a growing thing, but it doesn't yet seem to be huge.

Analog tracks the rawest, sure, but Visitors and others, for all their relative flaws, do track crawlers and related. They seem to me to track enough noise that the discrepancy isn't so easily attributable.

They say "84% of the browser market" now supports the DNT headers, but that's quite clearly a lie, as the article previously says that only IE9 supports DNT, not IE6-8.

Using the browser usage data they link to you can see it's actually only about 29% of the browser market that supports DNT headers.

This difference in stats may seem insignificant, but if it actually were 84% a lot more advertisers might pay attention to DNT, where as at 29% they're a lot more likely to be ignored. Even if Google Chrome got on board, it would still only be about 41%.

Safari will be the first browser to auto-block google ads. Jobs will send a one-liner "99% of people don't click on that crap."

Watch.

Would there be any practical difference between DNT baked into the browser and the cookie method from something like Beef Taco? https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/beef-taco-tar...

There is a Chrome extension "Keep My Opt-Outs" by Google. Is it different from the DNT and how?

It is an example of the "active" cookie based approach to this same thing mentioned in the article. The "Keep My Opt-Outs" extension is linked at the bottom of the article.

Are there differences between the "Do Not Track" implementations?

From TFA:

Mozilla made the first step in building broad browser support for "Do Not Track" in Firefox 4. Instead of the cookie-based mechanism suggested by the FTC, however, Firefox sends a specially formatted HTTP header to Web servers noting that the user does not want to be tracked. Microsoft added support for the headers in the recently released IE9, and now Apple appears set to add it to Safari once Lion is released.

Bah, this article is trash. The Chrome browser is free software which means that this feature will be added into the code, whether it is officially released as Chrome is another matter. I'm fairly certain that the non-Google version, Chromium or whatever they're calling it, will include this feature.

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